JSE-listed Netcare, the largest private healthcare and doctor network in Africa, is in the final stages of implementation of one of the largest data warehouses in South Africa, and expects to go live directly after it has addressed its last Y2K compliancy issues.
The R1 million data warehouse, an initial 350GB and growing at an equivalent volume each year, is being used to reconcile data from the group`s 46 hospitals nationwide, to improve management reporting and to initiate data mining to improve the group`s profitability.
Netcare`s hospitals are spread throughout South Africa, with one hospital in Rwanda. The group employs 13 500 people and reported 1999 turnover of R2.5 billion. It has grown rapidly through acquisition, and is merging hospitals at the rate of one a month.
"From a financial perspective our business revolves around patient days," says Netcare IT manager Joe Strydom. "Our pricing is determined by regulation, so to improve our bottom-line we have to work smarter and cut costs. This means we need meaningful information about our operations. The data warehouse is designed to provide this."
Netcare runs its own home-grown hospital information system which lies at the heart of the group`s business. It was written in SystemBuilder Plus and runs on the Universe database on a SCO Unix quad-Pentium server. Each hospital has its own server, is self-sufficient, and links to the central server in Auckland Park by way of Diginet lines.
"By the very nature of our business, our systems are truly mission-critical. We run a 24x7x365 business, and IT must match this urgency. Our time to market with new products is very tight, so the quality of information we have is paramount. In addition, the move to managed healthcare has had a profound impact on the healthcare market, and we need to keep our finger on the pulse: monthly, weekly and eventually daily."
The data warehouse is in pilot phase, and ready to go live once the business gives the green light. It is also based on the Universe database, designed in a star schema, with Ardent`s DataStage providing the extraction, transformation and loading (ETL) component for Netcare. Data is then extracted from the data warehouse, again using DataStage, and populated into Cognos PowerPlay for organisation into "cube" data marts for presentation to users: Netcare has bought a 50-user Cognos licence, and has trained senior management in its use to ensure the data warehouse is maximised.
"Because we have acquired so many clinics and hospitals, there are inconsistencies in the way some of the businesses operate," says Netcare MIS manager Heather Henderson. "We will use the data warehouse to find these inconsistencies and introduce a measure of business process reengineering (BPR) so as to standardise processes. With this in place, we will look to introduce data mining.
"Data mining will help us identify trends in the business that could be of great value," says Henderson. "For instance, we can work out the average time a patient spends in an operating room; average cost of medication; or ascertain why one clinic is less profitable than others."
The application of DataStage has been vital in ensuring the data warehouse runs smoothly, with the ETL process being accelerated dramatically. "In a test phase it took us 25 minutes to load 10MB of data into the data warehouse. With DataStage it loaded in under 45 seconds, making the loading of large amounts of data possible. In addition, we can now easily integrate other data, such as that from our human resources operational data store: it`s simply a matter of changing parameters."
Henderson says Netcare has applied extraordinary rigour and discipline up-front to ensure the data warehouse is a success.
"We have just one chance to make sure the data warehouse works, first time, and that it yields identifiable value to the business. Everything we have done has been with that objective in mind."
Henderson adds that the Ardent and Cognos teams, led by their respective MDs, Dave McWilliam and Ralph Pecker, have played an instrumental part in ensuring the overall success of the project.
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